 Hello and welcome back to my channel. Today it is the 6th of April, so I'm starting week two of Camp Nanarimo. And one of the things I realized last week was that I was really struggling with long writing sessions for this book, so I thought the perfect way to address that issue would be to do some writing sprints. And the good news is that because I took a few months off writing earlier this year, I have a bunch to catch up on. So for the next one hour and 52 minutes and 56 seconds, I'm going to be going along with the recording of the live writing stream that Kate Kavanaugh did a month or so ago. Oh Christina was going to get ice cream before this started. What an excellent decision. So one of the issues I have is that over the past few days I've been writing in a combination of four the words and just a document. And because I've been struggling to get into this book, I've been writing whatever I can think of. So I'm taking a moment to organize it before we get into the first sprint. Sprint down. So it's now 7.20, which means it has been about two hours since I last filmed, but I have not been writing for two hours because I ended up getting contacted by work about another communication that had to go out. And it's actually really annoying because I'm like if a genuine emergency comes up, of course I'm happy to work out of hours to make it okay. Like that actually happened on Friday where we had to send out an emergency communication because OPEC had an emergency meeting and our trading terms were changing and basically this needed to go out to stop people from losing money. So that was fine. I was online for a good two hours after my work day usually ends. No problem. Today though, they wanted to do an announcement that we have new shares and it was supposed to go live today, but I didn't hear anything before 5, so I logged off. And then after 6.30, I get this message going, okay, we're ready to go now. This needs to go out today. And it's like, well one, even if I get it out today, it's not going to go out today around the rest of the regions where we have business because a lot of people have stopped working by now. It's too late in the day to expect them to translate everything. And two, it's not like this isn't something that could wait for tomorrow. It's not like this is something where there's been a big campaign and we've been announcing it for ages. No, it's just this happens to be the day when it was switched on. But there's no reason why the announcement couldn't happen tomorrow, so I was a bit annoyed about that. So what that means is of my two hour live write-in, how far did I get through the video? I'm going to guess maybe an hour and 10 minutes. Yeah, oh not even, so just under an hour. And in that time there were two sprints. One was 20 minutes and one was 22. The 22 minute one got split in half because of the aforementioned work. So when I add this to my spreadsheet, it means I'm going to be doing three mini writing sessions. And in that there was first sprint, productive time was 20 minutes, the second one it was 12 and then 10. And the word counts were 323 for the first sprint. I actually went through what I wrote yesterday and just fleshed it out a bit more, which I think worked really well for like getting me back into the book. Just I know I always find it easier to work when there's already something there, so I'm really looking forward to when I've got a draft and there's something I can revise. In the next sprint, I didn't split the word count into the two separate sessions, so I'll just do half in each. So that's 382 for each sprint, which is pretty good writing efficiency per minute. I was actually using four the words and some of the monsters you can fight based on word count, so you need to write 500 words in this amount of time to win the battle. There are others which are time challenges though and because I just had 10 minutes for the last sprint, I did two five minute challenges and with those you actually need to keep up your writing pace or else the monster catches you. So I think that's why the word counts quite high for that last one because I was, you know, keeping up the writing, even though I wasn't sure what I was writing half the time. I'm really struggling with the scenes completed one because it's all a little bit all over the place. I'm just writing snippets that I feel like at the moment, so I think I'll just do half for each of them. Scene length equals, okay, so that brings me up to 283 minutes in total, which if I divide it by 60, I know it's going to be under what it should be, but I'm curious about how much, 23, am I 60? So that's 4.71 hours and today's day six, so I'm 1.3 hours behind schedule, which isn't too bad. I think, at least I hope, as I get through this book and start building up momentum, then I'll be able to get some longer sessions in and hit my average of an hour a day. Now, if we go to the Camp Nano website and feeling pretty good today at home on a laptop and I'm going to just make this 40 minutes because that's how long I was actually writing for. For nanorhymo up to 4,828 words, so making progress. Happy Tuesday! So today I went for a walk at lunchtime and I discovered there is a forest 20 minutes from my house and if you're in Europe and this isn't a big deal, the reason this is a big deal for me is because in Australia, if I walk 20 minutes from my house, I am still surrounded by houses in the same suburb. So that was kind of cool. I think I'll go back there tomorrow and see if I can get some footage. Other than that, it is a bit after five. I finished on time today. I'm hoping there won't be any disasters tonight because I'm just a bit wiped out from the past few weeks. I feel like my job has been 100% doing communications about market activity and changes to margin and financial chaos and I just don't have the time to look at any of the regular stuff and you know it's been three, four weeks now and it's starting to catch up on me so really hoping the rest of this week has just come and I can write. So my plan for tonight is to finish doing the live write-in that I was working on yesterday. There's another hour left which I assume will mean another 30 to 40 minutes of writing time. After that I'm not sure if I'll continue writing or if I'll just call it a night. I think I'll see how I feel and the reason for that is even though I'm behind on my one hour a day target, yeah I don't think it makes sense to burn myself out especially this early in the month. I'm hoping though that because this is a long weekend then I can catch up. Also before I start writing can we take a moment to admire the collection of cups and bottles that have made their way to my desk so far? My desk at work does not get this messy I promise you. I am done. I've been in the write-in for an hour now or 58 minutes if we're going to be really precise and of that I spent 43 minutes writing and I wrote 1034 words according to for the words. So now I'm going to update the Nanorama website as well as my spreadsheet and I'm definitely not going to write anymore this evening. I am feeling a bit spent. However I'm considering spending a little bit more time to do some more brainstormy planning type work because that will help in the coming days and I have some really good questions that have come from one of my subscribers Dawn who I mentioned in a past video. So if you go and check out my Camp Nanorama Week 1 video you'll see she's written this essay with a couple of really helpful tips for writing and one of them was to use a visualization exercise. So what she's written is sit back, close your eyes and imagine the glare of the prisoner, the scent of the prison cell, the decay or cleanliness around the point of view character, the sounds from the other prisoners, the expression of the prisoner or the sound of the point of view characters heartbeat, the emotional impact you've seen as a person how their body language tells you or doesn't tell you something about something about them. Even though she suggested this as like a visualization exercise I feel like when I like when I close my eyes and imagine it everything's very vivid. Maybe it isn't if I'm struggling to write it though but when I think about things it feels like they're very vivid. I feel like everything's very much alive in my head. It just loses all of the details when I try to put it onto paper. So I'm going to write down some of these questions for the next scene that I'm working on and hopefully that means when I sit down tomorrow to start writing again I'll have a little bit of an easier time of it and hopefully be able to write longer. Maybe I'll even hit an hour. Who knows? I will see you then. Today is Friday the 10th of April and I've had a two-day break from working on my book. Actually technically I did do a little bit of work yesterday but it was just some thinking time. So Wednesday there was just a bit of personal and professional stuff going on and I was I needed the day off. Yesterday I was just being a bit lazy so I did like 15 minutes of going through what I already had with the intention of then sitting down to work once I got to the end of my work day but by the time I got to the end of my work day it was just it was the end of the week after a very long few weeks where everything's just been so chaotic and I've had so much to get done then. I was feeling a little bit burnt out by it so I had a lazy night last night with the intention of making it back over this three-day weekend. So I've just finished a two-hour session. I started at three p.m. and finished at five p.m. and that was writing time but it was time I haven't actually written a new scene. I actually went through a couple of the things that I already have and just added to them and fleshed them out. Because I was trying to flesh things out though I actually spent a lot of time on Google Street View so this book takes place in New York where I've been there a number of times but obviously I'm not a local I can't just go out and pick the buildings I like and where I want it to be so I was on Street View basically exploring Chelsea because I know that's where Cara the object of our protagonist's affection lives and trying to add in all the details that I'd left playing last time like what the building looks like and so on. So in that two-hour session there were 68 minutes of productive time and I wrote 883 words. Word count per minute isn't very good at 12.9 but then again I wasn't I wasn't tracking really strictly it was if I started googling stuff realized after a couple of minutes okay I'm stuck in the googling stuff I'm not actually writing that's when I'd make a note because my very very sophisticated complex method of time tracking is to simply write down the time when I start something and write down when I finish something. So there's probably some leeway there it wasn't 68 minutes of solid writing but that's the information I have. In terms of scenes finished I'm not really sure how to do that because I was building on existing ones I'm just going to do zero I'll just make everything else zero. The time I spent yesterday was really helpful for realizing how much I have because every time I've sat down to try and write this I've felt like I'm completely out of my depths I don't know what I'm doing there's I have nothing to write I don't know what to say and it's easy to forget the fact that I did a whole lot of work on three different plotting methods over the last couple of months and I do have this list of scenes so one of the things I did was I copied that information from my spreadsheet into my word document where I'm working on my book and it's strange like I knew it was there I done I was there when I did the spreadsheet but I'd kind of forgotten how much there was so that's all in the document now which means I can simply go from one scene to the next it's all in one place and hopefully that'll keep me going. When it comes to results according to my spreadsheet I've done 409 minutes since I started this project and 7,594 words the actual word count in the document is 8,024 words and the reason for that is just because that includes the planning information. Now if we go to the NanoRymo website if I'm completely honest with you I'm not entirely sure why I'm updating the nano website because it's not tracking the goal I want to track but oh well so it was 883 words I really wish there was something between the expressionless face and the smiley face for how the session went because I don't feel like it's as smiley as the smiley faces but I don't think it's as expressionless as the expressionless faces and I'm going to make this 408 because I'm just going to count the productive time in the NanoRymo website rather than the full writing session so here we can also see that the word count is different again the reason for that is because my spreadsheet counts from the beginning of the project and I did do like two small days of writing before April so there's always going to be some discrepancy between what NanoRymo says and what my spreadsheet says. All in all I'm actually feeling pretty good after yesterday and today I by no means think that I'm going to produce a masterpiece in this experiment but I feel like I have more of a foundation to continue. One of the challenges I have though is that my goal is 30 hours and I've been measuring productive time so if like today I had a two hour session but half of that was spent on google maps looking at different buildings then that isn't two hours of productive time it was 68 minutes of productive time the problem is that that means it's going to be much harder to reach the 30 hours and I don't know if I'm going to catch up so if I okay I'm just going to include the first two days in my total because that's easier than subtracting them while I'm working on this video but we've got 409 divided by 10 which is 40.9 minutes a day so I'm 200 minutes behind where I should be so that's three hours and 20 minutes I and the thing that's a little bit challenging is I did two hours today I could do two hours tomorrow and two hours on sunday and in theory that should be enough for me to catch up but if they're not productive hours then it's not enough for me to catch up so I'm not sure if I should measure total writing time or not I need to think about this in any case I do want to be much more consistent and I'm hoping that just having this long weekend and being able to recover from the craziness that has been my professional life over the past few weeks over these coming days will help and will put me in a better place for the rest of April it is Saturday the 11th of April and I've just done an hour of working on reciprocal stalking and what's challenging is that it wasn't completely productive hour because I was you know occasionally looking things up but it wasn't like yesterday where I was spending half an hour at a time wandering the streets of New York with Street View so I am going to count it as an hour of writing but I think one of the things I'm realizing with this project is just that it's going to move a bit slower than the last one because I'm a little bit out of my depth and the further I get the more questions come up that I haven't really thought about yet so all in all happy with my progress so far for today I think I will try another writing session later today just to get my word count and my hours up but for now let's do the spreadsheet so my session was from 10 to 11 a.m time was spent writing 60 minutes and my word count was 856 words scenes completed one of the things I'm really struggling with with this is that and I struggled with this in my last book as well is that I tend to write sequences of scenes and it's hard to figure out when one ends and one begins so hmm in fact I think I if I make what I was doing now the continuation of the one I was doing earlier this week then it would be 0.25 of a scene done hmm I need to figure out how to calculate scene lengths uh time to complete scene is 240 minutes up this doesn't feel right I think I need to look at the formulas in this spreadsheet but anyway at least the information is there the charts are updated and I can complete the nanorama website so 856 words and progress is updated it is now about quarter past six in the evening and even though I had the best of intentions to get back to writing today I now know it is not going to happen so the day went I started with writing which was good but it then went to watching community and coming out to Peleosare with my husband there's like this national park slash wetlands at the tip of might be the tip of the country but definitely the tip of Tallinn so um we went there for a walk and then got back and decided to do some more thumbnail photos and suddenly it was six o'clock so no more writing for me today but I thought I would recap my stats from the last week as a way of signing off so if I look at my spreadsheet week one and I'm doing my week from Sunday the 29th of March so week one I did 176 minutes so that's just under three hours and wrote 3037 words and week two I did 203 minutes so about three hours and 20 minutes and wrote 3939 words so in terms of word count that's increased significantly compared to last week especially considering that I didn't spend that much more time so the word count has gone up disproportionately to the amount the time has gone up which would be great if a word count was my target unfortunately time is my target and that's not going up but I still have hope it has only been two weeks it's the 11th of April so there's still more than half of the month left and I think that at least I hope that as I continue getting into the book I will start spending more time on it I also have a bit of an experiment in mind for next week which I think is going to help me get some more time under my belt as well so I will see you then bye